Meet our Invited Speakers

A professor of neuroscience at the Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University, Japan. Her laboratory is interested in how the brain decodes the meaning of sound signals, such as music and courtship songs. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an ideal model for answering this question, as it offers a comprehensive range of tools and assays which allow us to dissect the mechanisms underlying sound perception and evaluation in the brain. To answer how song signals, especially the species-specific sound rhythm, are evaluated in the fly brain, they are systematically exploring the features of the fly auditory system.

A senior investigator and section chief of the Developmental Genomics Section​, and the head of the laboratory of Biochemistry & Genetics. The work in the Oliver lab utilises Drosophila to develop predictive models of gene function with a specific focus on sex differentiation in the germline. The approach relies on high-throughput techniques used to profile biological processes such as expression, promoter occupancy, and chromatin status, in conjunction with computational analysis and genetics.

Dr. Chao Tong obtained her Ph. D. degree from UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and did her Postdoc training in Dr. Hugo Bellen’s laboratory in Baylor College of Medicine. She currently is a professor in Zhejiang University, China. Her major research interest is to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration diseases. Particularly, her lab is interested in how organelles such as mitochondria, autophagosomes, and lysosomes contribute to neuronal homeostasis. They aim to identify novel players and to define molecular pathways in neural maintenance by using Drosophila as a model system.

A distinguished research fellow and the Director of the institute of cellular and organismic biology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. His lab is interested in studying how neurons form complex yet stereotyped synaptic connections during development and how the assembled neural circuits extract visual attributes, such as colour and motion, to guide animal behaviors. To study visual circuit functions, they have combined structural and functional approaches to map visual circuits. 

Christen Mirth was awarded her PhD in 2002 from University of Cambridge (UK) and conducted her post-doctoral training at the University of Washington, USA (2003-2008), and Janelia Research Campus, USA (2008-2010). In 2010, She became a Group Leader at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal). In November 2015, she was recruited to the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University and in 2017, was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship. Work in her lab aims to uncover the signalling pathways through which diet and nutrition modify animal development to affect key life history traits, including body size and shape and developmental timing. Furthermore, the work aim to predict how genetic variation within populations alters the activity of these signalling pathways, and how this in turn defines the way in which animals adapt to changing environments.

A Silver Professor of Biology and of Neuroscience at NYU and an Affiliate Professor at the CGSB at NYU in Abu Dhabi. Dr. Desplan was born in Algeria and was trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in St. Cloud, France.  He received his DSc at INSERM in Paris in 1983 working with M.S. Moukhtar and M. Thomasset on calcium regulation. He joined Pat O’Farrell at UCSF as a postdoc where he demonstrated that the homeodomain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA binding motif. In 1987, he joined the Faculty of Rockefeller University as an HHMI Assistant and Associate Investigator to pursue structural studies of the homeodomain and the evolution of axis formation. In 1999, Dr. Desplan joined NYU where he investigates the generation of neural diversity using the Drosophila visual system. His team has described the molecular mechanisms that pattern the eye and showed how stochastic decisions contribute to the diversification of photoreceptors. It also investigates the development and function of the optic lobes where neuronal diversity is generated by spatio-temporal patterning of neuroblasts, a mechanism that also applies to cortical development in mammals.  His laboratory also uses ‘evo-devo’ approaches to understand the mechanisms by which sensory systems adapt to different ecological conditions, from flies to ants to butterflies. Dr. Desplan serves on multiple scientific advisory boards and committees for funding agencies. He is an elected member of the AAAS, of EMBO, the New York Academy of Sciences as well as the US National Academy of Sciences. 

A neurobiologist at Temasek, Singapore. Fengwei received his PhD degree at Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), Singapore in 2003. He then joined Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) to establish his independent research group. Fengwei was awarded the National Young Scientist Award as the sole winner in the biomedical category for his breakthrough research on neural development and neurological disorders in 2007. He is an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences (DBS/NUS), a supervisor in the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS/NUS), and Singapore Graduate Programme in Neuroscience (SGPN).

A Principle Fellow at Genentech, focusing on treating age related and chronic diseases. After receiving his PhD, Heinrich Jasper moved to the University of Rochester Medical Center, first as a researcher in the department of biomedical genetics, then as a tenured research professor at the department of biology. He has been at the Buck Institute since the summer of 2012 where he has studied the effects of stress, diet, and metabolic signaling on stem cell maintenance and regeneration. 

A neurodevelopmental biologist and Professor at Duke NUS, Singapore. Wang uses Drosophila and mammalian neural stem cells (NSCs) to model neurodevelopmental disorders and brain tumours. elected EMBO Associate Member (2020), recipient of the Singapore National Academy of Science Young Scientist Award (2008), and the National Research Foundation (NRF) Research Fellowship (2009-2014). She is Associate Editor of PLOS Genetics and Genetics; Asia-Pacific Drosophila Board member, the founding president of Society of Developmental Biologists Singapore, and executive member of Stem Cell Society Singapore.

A Drosophila geneticist recognized for developing numerous genetic tools and for generating fly strains and molecular tools that have transformed Drosophila biology. Originally from Belgium, he earned a degree in Business Engineering from the Solvay School of Business at the University of Brussels, a Pre-Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Antwerp and a Doctoral degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Ghent. He received his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Davis working with Dr. John Kiger, and completed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Walter Gehring at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland. Bellen joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in 1989, and he joined the Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital at its inception in 2011. He served as the Director of the BCM Graduate Program in Developmental Biology for more than 20 years and is truly dedicated to graduate education and postdoctoral training. He is a recipient of the George Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America (GSA) for his outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers. He has been elected the 2020 Vice-President/2021 President of the GSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Justin Kumar is a Professor within the Biology Department at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana (USA). He began using the compound eye of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model system for studying developmental paradigms as an undergraduate in the lab of Karl Fryxell at the University of California, Riverside. He continued his training in eye development as a graduate student with Donald Ready at Purdue University and as a post-doctoral fellow with Kevin Moses at both the University of Southern California and Emory University. He has been on the faculty at Indiana University since 2002. 

Dr. Kumar’s research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms by which an evolutionarily conserved gene regulatory circuit called the retinal determination (RD) network controls the formation and patterning of the Drosophila compound eye. Mutations in the RD circuit result in drastic reductions or the complete loss of the compound eyes while forced expression of network members in non-ocular tissues induces their trans-differentiation into retina/lens structures. When introduced into flies, mouse and human homologs can rescue mutant phenotypes and induce ectopic eyes. Similarly, forced expression of Drosophila genes in mice results in the formation of lens/retina structures. Thus, this circuit seems to lie atop the entire gene regulatory network that controls eye formation, and its function has been preserved across 500 million years of evolutionary history. Dr. Kumar is specifically interested in the mechanisms by which the RD network guides a multipotent population of cells towards the adoption of a retinal fate while simultaneously rejecting alternate fates. 

Laboratory website: https://kumarlab.bio.indiana.edu

Twitter: @FlyEyeLab

Email: jkumar@indiana.edu

Institution: Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America 

Keywords: Drosophila, retina, eye, transcription, gene regulation, organ specification, pattern formation

Krystyna Keleman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) since September 2022, having previously been a group leader at the Janelia Campus in the US and at the Institute of molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. She was also the founding director of the Vienna Drosophila RNAi centre. For her PhD, she studied the molecular and cellular mechanisms of axon pathfinding in Drosophila. During her postdoctoral research and later in her own group, she turned her attention to Drosophila behaviour. Her research is directed towards understanding the molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying cognitive functions of the brain such as learning and memory. She seeks to understand how different types of memories are encoded in the brain, and how transient short-term memories are consolidated into longer-lasting forms of memory, including during sleep.

After completing her PhD studies in Adelaide (1999) and conducting postdoctoral research at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (2000-2007), Dr Quinn established her laboratory at the University of Melbourne in 2007. In 2016 Dr Quinn relocated to The John Curtin School of Medical Research (ANU, Canberra) to establish the Quinn Group - Cancer Models in the ACRF Department of Cancer Biology and Therapeutics.

Linda Partridge works on the biology of ageing. Her research is directed to understanding the mechanisms by which healthy lifespan can be extended in laboratory model organisms and humans. Her work has focussed in particular on the role of nutrient-sensing pathways, such as the insulin/insulin-like growth factor signalling pathway, and on the role of diet, and her primary interest is in geroprotective drugs. 

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Royal Society's Croonian Prize Lecture, and was honoured with a DBE for Services to Science in 2009. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany and Biological Secretary and vice-President of the Royal Society. 

An associate professor at the Department of Biological sciences at IISER Mohali. She is the head of the Developmental  Genetics  Laboratory  and is  interested  in  Hematopoiesis, Cardiogenesis and Molecular pathways in stem and progenitor cell development.

A/Prof Louise Cheng is an ARC Future Fellow (2019-2022), jointly appointed at the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology and the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne, and she is the Head of Stem Cell Growth Regulation Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. A/Prof Cheng completed her PhD at Kings College London in 2006. For her postdoctoral training, she worked in the lab of Dr Alex Gould at the National Institute for Medical Research, on how nutrient signalling affects organ size control. She established her independent laboratory at Peter Mac in 2012. Her team utilises Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism to investigate 1) how fate is maintained in differentiated neurons to prevent dedifferentiation and tumour initiation, 2) how stem cells interact with their microenvironment, and 3) how tumours can grow at the expense of muscles and adipose tissue during cancer cachexia.

A Professor and chair of cell, developmental and regenerative biology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Marek did his PhD at the Biocenter at the University of Basel. His laboratory studies the establishment of epithelial planar cell polarity (PCP) regulated by Wnt/Frizzled-PCP signaling and the mechanisms of Wnt-signaling specificity regulation between the PCP and canonical beta-catenin pathways. His lab is also interested in the cross-talk between the Wnt/Frizzled pathways and Notch and Egf-receptor signalling.

A developmental biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland. Affolter researches the cellular and molecular processes involved in the formation of organs and blood vessel networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and zebrafish. He has extensively used live-imaging, high-resolution microscopy in studying network formation in these animals, work which has enabled the better understanding of the function of molecules in morphogenesis. 

Dr. Deng's laboratory is interested in how cell-cell and cell-tissue microenvironment interactions are involved in normal development and how disruption of such interactions leads to tumorigenesis in the Drosophila model system.  Current research projects in the Deng lab include: I. Characterization of “tumor hotspots” in Drosophila epithelial models; II. Postmitotic cell competition and compensatory cellular hypertrophy in Drosophila follicle cells; III. Notch mediated intercellular communication and cell cycle regulation and growth control; and IV. Mechanistic investigation of malignant rhabdoid childhood tumor using the Drosophila model.

Using the genetically tractable Drosophila model, Dr. Deng's research focuses on fundamental questions in cancer biology and developmental biology.  The research topics range from understanding how tissue microenvironment contributes to neoplastic tumor transformation and progression to studying how growth and tissue homeostasis are regulated during development and tumorigenesis.  The research in his laboratory has led to the development of novel concepts such as tissue “tumor hotspots” and “compensatory cellular hypertrophy,” and publications in high-impact journals. Dr. Deng has received continuous external funding and was awarded the University Developing Scholar Award in 2010 and the Pfeiffer Endowed Professorship for Cancer Research in 2018.

Professor in Department of Bio and Fermentation Convergence Technology, Kookmin University, Republic of Korea 

Professional Experience

Assiatant/Associate/Full Professor (Mar. 2013 – current)
Department of Bio and Fermentation Convergence Technology, Kookmin University

Research Assistant Professor (Mar. 2012 – Feb. 2013)
Department of Oral Biology, Yonsei University College of Dentistry

Education

Postdoctoral Fellow (Sept. 2006 – Mar. 2012) Department of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Ph.D. (Sep. 2001 - Feb. 2006) Laboratory of developmental genetics and neural network, Department of Biological Science, KAIST
(Postdoc in the same lab Mar. - Jul. 2006)

M.S. (Sep. 1999 - Aug. 2001) Laboratory of developmental genetics, Department of Biological Science, KAIST

B.A. (Mar. 1993 - Feb. 1999) Department of Crop Science (minor: genetic engineering), Korea University, Seoul

Selected Publications

Shrestha, B., Aryal, B., and Lee, Y. The taste of vitamin C in Drosophila.
(2023) EMBO Reports doi: 10.15252/embr.202256319. Online ahead of print.

Dhakal, S.*, Ren, Q.*, Liu, J.*, Akitake, B., Montell, C.#, and Lee, Y. # Drosophila TRPγ is required in neuroendocrine cells for post-ingestive food selection. (2022) eLife 11:e56726. doi: 10.7554/eLife.56726.

Aryal B., Dhakal, S., Shrestha, B., and Lee, Y. Molecular and neuronal mechanisms for amino acid taste perception in the Drosophila labellum. (2022) Curr Biol. 32(6):1376-1386

Dhakal, S., Jiun, S., Aryal B., and Lee, Y. Ionotropic receptors mediate nitrogenous waste avoidance in Drosophila melanogaster. (2021)
Communications Biology 12;4(1):1281. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-02799-3.

Jiun, S.*, Rimal, S.*, and Lee, Y. Gustatory receptor 28b is necessary for avoiding saponin in Drosophila melanogaster. (2019) EMBO Reports 20(2): pii: e47328. doi: 10.15252/embr.201847328.

Rimal, S., Jiun, S., Poudel, S., Tharkur D., Montell, C.,# and Lee, Y.# Mechanism of acetic acid gustatory repulsion in Drosophila. (2019) Cell Reports 26: 1432-1442.

Lee, Y.*#, Poudel, S.*, Kim, Y.*, Tharkur D., and Montell, C #. Calcium taste avoidance in Drosophila (2018) Neuron. 97(1):67-74. (*co-first author, #corresponding author)

Shim, J. *, Lee, Y. *, Jeong, Y.T. *, Kim, Y. *, Lee, M.G., Montell, C. #, and Moon, S.J. # The full repertoire of Drosophila gustatory receptors for detecting an aversive compound (2015) Nature Communication 6:8867. doi: 10.1038/ncomms9867 (*co-first author, #corresponding author)

Lee, Y., and Montell, C. Drosophila TRPA1 functions in temperature control of circadian rhythm in pacemaker neurons (2013). Journal of Neuroscience 33(16):6716-6725

Lee, Y.*, Kang, M.J.*, Shim, J.W., Cheong, C.U., Moon, S.J., and Montell, C.
2

Gustatory receptors required for avoiding the insecticide, L-canavanine (2012). Journal of Neuroscience 32:1429-1435 (*co-first author)

Lee, Y., Kim, S.H., and Montell, C. (2010). Avoiding DEET through insect gustatory receptors. Neuron 67:555-561

Kim, S.H.*, Lee, Y.*, Akitake, B., Woodward, O.M., Guggino, W.B., and Montell, C. (2010). Drosophila TRPA1 channel mediates chemical avoidance in gustatory receptor neurons. PNAS 107:8440-8445 (*co-first author) IF:9.681

Lee, Y., Moon S.J., and Montell, C. (2009). Multiple gustatory receptors required for the caffeine response in Drosophila. PNAS 106:4495-4500, IF:9.681
: Featured in Faculty of 1000 Biology (http://www.f1000biology.com/article/id/1278958)

Hyun, S., Lee, Y., Hong, S.T., Bang, S., Paik, D., Kang, J., Shin, J., Lee, J., Jeon, K., Hwang, S., Bae, E., and Kim, J. (2005). Drosophila GPCR Han is a receptor for circadian clock neuropeptide PDF. Neuron. 48:267-278.

Lee, Y.*, Lee, Y.*, Lee, J., Bang, S., Hyun, S., Kang, J., Hong, S.T., Bae, E., Kaang, B.K., and Kim, J. (2005). Pyrexia is a new thermal transient receptor potential channel endowing tolerance to high temperatures in Drosophila melanogaster. Nature Genetics. 37(3):305-310. (*co-first author)